No Arabic abstract
Longest Run Subsequence is a problem introduced recently in the context of the scaffolding phase of genome assembly (Schrinner et al., WABI 2020). The problem asks for a maximum length subsequence of a given string that contains at most one run for each symbol (a run is a maximum substring of consecutive identical symbols). The problem has been shown to be NP-hard and to be fixed-parameter tractable when the parameter is the size of the alphabet on which the input string is defined. In this paper we further investigate the complexity of the problem and we show that it is fixed-parameter tractable when it is parameterized by the number of runs in a solution, a smaller parameter. Moreover, we investigate the kernelization complexity of Longest Run Subsequence and we prove that it does not admit a polynomial kernel when parameterized by the size of the alphabet or by the number of runs. Finally, we consider the restriction of Longest Run Subsequence when each symbol has at most two occurrences in the input string and we show that it is APX-hard.
At CPM 2017, Castelli et al. define and study a new variant of the Longest Common Subsequence Problem, termed the Longest Filled Common Subsequence Problem (LFCS). For the LFCS problem, the input consists of two strings $A$ and $B$ and a multiset of characters $mathcal{M}$. The goal is to insert the characters from $mathcal{M}$ into the string $B$, thus obtaining a new string $B^*$, such that the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) between $A$ and $B^*$ is maximized. Casteli et al. show that the problem is NP-hard and provide a 3/5-approximation algorithm for the problem. In this paper we study the problem from the experimental point of view. We introduce, implement and test new heuristic algorithms and compare them with the approximation algorithm of Casteli et al. Moreover, we introduce an Integer Linear Program (ILP) model for the problem and we use the state of the art ILP solver, Gurobi, to obtain exact solution for moderate sized instances.
In this work, we consider a variant of the classical Longest Common Subsequence problem called Doubly-Constrained Longest Common Subsequence (DC-LCS). Given two strings s1 and s2 over an alphabet A, a set C_s of strings, and a function Co from A to N, the DC-LCS problem consists in finding the longest subsequence s of s1 and s2 such that s is a supersequence of all the strings in Cs and such that the number of occurrences in s of each symbol a in A is upper bounded by Co(a). The DC-LCS problem provides a clear mathematical formulation of a sequence comparison problem in Computational Biology and generalizes two other constrained variants of the LCS problem: the Constrained LCS and the Repetition-Free LCS. We present two results for the DC-LCS problem. First, we illustrate a fixed-parameter algorithm where the parameter is the length of the solution. Secondly, we prove a parameterized hardness result for the Constrained LCS problem when the parameter is the number of the constraint strings and the size of the alphabet A. This hardness result also implies the parameterized hardness of the DC-LCS problem (with the same parameters) and its NP-hardness when the size of the alphabet is constant.
The problem of matching a query string to a directed graph, whose vertices are labeled by strings, has application in different fields, from data mining to computational biology. Several variants of the problem have been considered, depending on the fact that the match is exact or approximate and, in this latter case, which edit operations are considered and where are allowed. In this paper we present results on the complexity of the approximate matching problem, where edit operations are symbol substitutions and are allowed only on the graph labels or both on the graph labels and the query string. We introduce a variant of the problem that asks whether there exists a path in a graph that represents a query string with any number of edit operations and we show that is is NP-complete, even when labels have length one and in the case the alphabet is binary. Moreover, when it is parameterized by the length of the input string and graph labels have length one, we show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable and it is unlikely to admit a polynomial kernel. The NP-completeness of this problem leads to the inapproximability (within any factor) of the approximate matching when edit operations are allowed only on the graph labels. Moreover, we show that the variants of approximate string matching to graph we consider are not fixed-parameter tractable, when the parameter is the number of edit operations, even for graphs that have distance one from a DAG. The reduction for this latter result allows us to prove the inapproximability of the variant where edit operations can be applied both on the query string and on graph labels.
We consider the classic problem of computing the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) of two strings of length $n$. While a simple quadratic algorithm has been known for the problem for more than 40 years, no faster algorithm has been found despite an extensive effort. The lack of progress on the problem has recently been explained by Abboud, Backurs, and Vassilevska Williams [FOCS15] and Bringmann and Kunnemann [FOCS15] who proved that there is no subquadratic algorithm unless the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis fails. This has led the community to look for subquadratic approximation algorithms for the problem. Yet, unlike the edit distance problem for which a constant-factor approximation in almost-linear time is known, very little progress has been made on LCS, making it a notoriously difficult problem also in the realm of approximation. For the general setting, only a naive $O(n^{varepsilon/2})$-approximation algorithm with running time $tilde{O}(n^{2-varepsilon})$ has been known, for any constant $0 < varepsilon le 1$. Recently, a breakthrough result by Hajiaghayi, Seddighin, Seddighin, and Sun [SODA19] provided a linear-time algorithm that yields a $O(n^{0.497956})$-approximation in expectation; improving upon the naive $O(sqrt{n})$-approximation for the first time. In this paper, we provide an algorithm that in time $O(n^{2-varepsilon})$ computes an $tilde{O}(n^{2varepsilon/5})$-approximation with high probability, for any $0 < varepsilon le 1$. Our result (1) gives an $tilde{O}(n^{0.4})$-approximation in linear time, improving upon the bound of Hajiaghayi, Seddighin, Seddighin, and Sun, (2) provides an algorithm whose approximation scales with any subquadratic running time $O(n^{2-varepsilon})$, improving upon the naive bound of $O(n^{varepsilon/2})$ for any $varepsilon$, and (3) instead of only in expectation, succeeds with high probability.
The {em longest common subsequence (LCS)} problem is a classic and well-studied problem in computer science. LCS is a central problem in stringology and finds broad applications in text compression, error-detecting codes and biological sequence comparison. However, in numerous contexts, words represent cyclic sequences of symbols and LCS must be generalized to consider all circular shifts of the strings. This occurs especially in computational biology when genetic material is sequenced form circular DNA or RNA molecules. This initiates the problem of {em longest common cyclic subsequence (LCCS)} which finds the longest subsequence between all circular shifts of two strings. In this paper, we give an $O(n^2)$ algorithm for solving LCCS problem where $n$ is the number of symbols in the strings.